Abstract:

This article considers key strategies deployed in the history of drawing since the 1970s and how these work towards interfaces between the corporeality of the artist and the materiality of the drawing itself. Connections between such interfaces and Umberto Eco's typology of modes of sign production are considered in relation to each key drawing strategy. Such connections may contribute to semiotics for drawing which takes into account the growing importance and complexity of corporeality-materiality in the face of what Elizabeth Grosz has called the profound "somatophobia" (1999:5) of the Western dualist philosophical tradition. Contemporary drawing critiques this tradition through its multifarious practices, while exploring its own parameters to become a transcognitive activity involving modes of sigifiacation [signification] and materials and bodies mutually productive in the act of making.